by George Bruce
And so the General carried out the captain’s wishes, putting the troops on to half- and the wretched camp-followers on to quarter-rations.
Trying to keep alive upon things of such doubtful food value as fried sheep’s skin mixed with a few grains of flour, the followers risked entering nearby Afghan villages with their pockets full of money to try to buy food. It was too tempting. Lieutenant Henry Durand noted: ‘The inhabitants of the surrounding villages… became exasperated at the prospect of everything being eaten up by the halting multitude of troops, camp-followers and cattle; and finding the opportunity favourable for plunder, they deserted their villages and sought to indemnify themselves for any losses… by carrying off camels and by stripping and murdering camp-followers, who, though wanting food, were constantly found to have a good deal of money on their persons.’
The Bombay force meanwhile, in command of Keane, and reduced for various reasons to 7,000 British and Indian troops, about 500 of Shah Shuja’s troops and several thousand of the inevitable camp-followers, struggled through the Bolan Pass in its turn, hindered by both the attacks of tribesmen and the rotting carcasses of camels, cattle and horses left by the Bengal force. Ten young tribesmen were caught and summarily executed by command of Keane on 19 March, the officer ordered to superintend this unpleasant task insisting upon written orders from Keane.
‘The poor wretches had their elbows secured,’ relates Dr. Kennedy, ‘and were made to sit on the ground. Some resisted and, to keep them quiet, the execution party fastened their heads together by their long luxuriant hair, which served to secure them for their destruction. Two young lads seemed horrified to bewilderment by their fears and implored for mercy, seizing the feet and knees of the superintending officer, but they were made to sit down. Ere the fatal volley exploded they were endeavouring to embrace, leaning their heads against each other, weeping bitterly their last farewell. This was sad work and did no good: we were robbed and our camels stolen at every stage.’
A rough, short-tempered man, Keane was not much troubled about the methods he used to maintain security. It was war.
He rode ahead of the Bombay force at last and entered General Cotton’s camp at Quetta on 6 April to find pinched and sullen faces.
He took over command and issued a surprising order of the day thanking General Cotton for the ‘able and judicious manner in which he had led the Bengal force in highly creditable order into Afghanistan’.
But by pinning Cotton down at Quetta, Keane had seriously weakened the force on the threshold of an enemy country. In return he had gained the hollow triumph of Shah Shuja’s being able to enter Kandahar at the head of the force. Perhaps he was guided by the words of Lord Auckland’s Simla Manifesto: ‘His Majesty Shah Shuja-ool-Mulk will enter Afghanistan surrounded by his own troops and will be supported against foreign interference… by a British army.’
Auckland and Macnaghten had forecast a general welcome in Afghanistan for the force, yet not a single Afghan chief of any importance had come forward with his followers to join Shah Shuja. ‘On the contrary,’ says G. R. Gleig, the force’s chaplain, ‘the few whom consideration of policy had induced to seek his presence while yet at Shikapore, he had so disgusted by his coldness that they returned to their homes, and spread abroad tidings every way unfavourable.’
Keane now reorganised his divisional commands, putting General Cotton in command of the Bengal divisional infantry, known as the 1st Division, which up till then had been very efficiently commanded by General Nott; and General Willshire in command of the Bombay divisional infantry. General Nott, he planned to leave behind at Quetta with a mere brigade.
Nott, an able and experienced East India Company officer, was senior to both Generals Cotton and Willshire, who, like Keane himself, were Queen’s officers. Now, in what he saw as a ‘deadly hit’ against Company officers, Nott found himself pushed aside to make room for them.
Hardly the man to accept such treatment willingly, he sought an interview with Keane, who told him that the Governor-General had ordered that command of the 1st Division must be given to Cotton — which Nott had good reason to know for a lie.
This rather comical interview then took a course which shows to what a disastrous peak of bitterness feelings between senior Indian and Queen’s officers in this army had risen. Nott wrote it down afterwards.
‘Your conduct is very extraordinary in an officer of your rank,’ Keane began.
‘Your Excellency is aware that I hold the Queen’s commission of Major-General?’ Nott responded.
‘Yes.’
‘I am therefore entitled to the command of a division in preference to local Generals Thackwell and Willshire, and yet you have placed General Willshire in command of a division.’
‘If you think yourself aggrieved, you can appeal to the Court of Directors, General Nott. I see clearly that nothing I can say will convince you.’
‘No, Your Excellency, nothing that you have said on this subject can convince me.’
‘You insult my authority.’ Keane was bristling.
‘I am not aware that I have; what I have said is my deliberate judgement, which nothing can change.’
Nott rose to go with the words: ‘Well, Your Excellency, I trust I have left no ill impression upon your mind. I see the whole affair; I am to be sacrificed because I happen to be senior to the Queen’s officers.’
‘Ill impression, Sir! I will never forget your conduct as long as I live!’ Keane shouted.
‘Oh! Your Excellency, since that is the case, I have only to wish you a very good evening,’ Nott responded.
The outcome of this interview seems like another stroke of fate. Nott, the ablest soldier in the army, was stupidly kept behind in the south with some 3,000 troops to guard the lines of communication, too far from Kabul to be of any use when the storm finally broke.
Keane’s objectives now were an advance farther into Afghanistan to occupy the city-fortresses of Kandahar, Ghazni and Kabul and place Shuja on the throne. But Cotton having failed to procure him any information about which of the three passes he should choose over the Khojuk mountains ahead, Keane did possibly the only thing he could have done under the circumstances — he chose the one reported to have most water, marched on 7 April 1839, and blundered badly.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The advance began in the cool of the early morning when no hostile tribesman were to be seen, but shortly after leaving camp the troops were alerted by repeated firing. It was the shooting of sixty cavalry horses, which were too weak from lack of food to march — an inauspicious start.
The pass itself was reached a few days later and General Keane got out of his palanquin to ride ahead and reconnoitre this challenging 11-mile-long defile — a death-trap only 80 or 90 feet wide, rising from 6,800 feet to a summit of nearly 7,500 feet. The stony track, the rarefied air, the weakness of men and animals, all made the task of dragging through the 60-hundred-weight 18-pounder guns and ammunition wagons practically impossible.
A long steep ascent with a sudden sharp left turn and at once a steeper hairpin turn to the right was followed by a long hard climb to the summit. Here there was worse — a dizzy one-in-three fall for 800 yards over a surface of loose broken rock with an occasional, sudden precipice. Captain Thomson’s engineers had cleverly cut and blasted three separate paths — a narrow one for camels, another for men and horses and a wider one for the guns. Keane ordered the infantry and a camel-drawn battery of howitzers to march at 3 a.m. 13 April, then the camel baggage-train, cavalry and artillery.
Troops were to be told off to help drag the artillery across. Keane’s orders said: ‘Only one camel can pass up at a time and H.E. impresses upon officers the necessity of having their own animals as well as those of the men as lightly laden as circumstances will admit. This will be the only mode of preserving their baggage as every camel that falls must be removed with his load out of the path…’
But soon the underfed camels, grotesquely overladen, would fall,
and die where they fell — the crystal glass and the silver plate would adorn the Afghan chiefs’ bare mud forts and the tribesmen’s hovels.
At 3 a.m. the bugles sounded — the long lines of Colonel Sale’s red-coated 1st Infantry Brigade marched off, followed an hour later by the artillery and at six o’clock when the sun’s rays were already hot, by Generals Keane and Willshire, the headquarters staff, their cavalry escort, retinues of Indian servants and the interminable baggage-train. Soon, the climb was so steep and the struggle upward so hard in the thin air that the baggage-train slowed to a snail’s pace.
A 9-pounder gun then slipped over the edge of the road, rolling men and horses with it down a small precipice. By the time the gunners had replaced a wheel and manhandled the gun back a long queue had formed behind. Three or four miles to the rear, Brigadier Arnold, leading the cavalry, now floundered upon the tail of the baggage-train.
A dense mass of cursing men and bellowing animals soon blocked four or five miles of the pass. Many of the camels dropped through sheer weakness, were shot where they fell — cavalry troopers then heaved them off the track and left them.
Bugles blew the halt to try to stop the confusion worsening. But by late afternoon it was clear that this horde of men and animals would be jammed together there for the rest of the day, a superb target for Afghan marksmen. Three companies of infantry were now ordered back to guard the supplies and ammunition still in the camp.
Through the press of guns, horses, troopers and camels, the infantrymen struggled and cursed their way, finally completing a chaos unmatched since armies first trod the arid mountains of Asia.
Far ahead, towards the summit, infantry working parties piled their arms and, stripped to the waist, grappled with the backbreaking task of manhandling the unwieldy guns on long drag-ropes up to the summit. Quite apart from their lack of weight and strength compared with oxen and horses, men were not made for tractive work. Four legs, it would seem, are essential, on a steep ascent especially, for a man must push forwards and upwards with one leg while he advances with the other. He falls easily and when one falls, many tend to fall with him.
Thus for the infantrymen bent at the drag-ropes and the wheels of the ponderous guns, blinded with sweat, slipping and scrambling upwards over the sharp shifting rock, panting in the mountain air, it was shattering labour.
They moved the guns forward inches at a time, then thrust stones behind the wheels to hold them. The sergeant shouted ‘Heave!’ and another foot was gained. After half an hour the exhausted men were replaced by another company of 100 men and the first breathless company fell out by the roadside to sip a little brackish water and lie flat on their backs.
On this first day only those of the infantry not needed at the guns, together with General Keane, the Headquarters officers, their several hundred servants and a fraction of the baggage came through the pass. They marched 2½ miles the other side of it to the camp at Chaman Chokee, in a valley about 600 yards wide.
Commissariat animals loaded with supplies, the guns, the infantry, cavalry and 20,000 camp-followers spent the night jammed together in the pass, testifying to the unreality of General Keane’s ideas about the mobility of his army.
The next day too, the infantry bent to their Herculean task, and despite the shortage of food and water, despite dust, heat and flies, their morale stayed high. As each gun and its ammunition wagon creaked to the summit, the gun crew attached brake-shoes to each wheel, reversed the ropes on the drag-links of the axle-hubs and manhandled one gun at a time down the dizzy slope from the summit and thence by degrees to the plain, where once more the horses took over.
But for all their sweat and muscle, the three or four thousand infantrymen in small teams toiled for a week hauling 18-pounder guns, the 8-inch mortars and the 24-pounder howitzers over the pass — not until 21 April were all the guns finally manhandled down into the plain.
Keane was lucky — one Afghan chief with a few hundred resolute marksmen could have brought the entire force to a standstill at this time by merely shooting down the camel transport. But Dost Mahommed was not loved by all; the flame of patriotism hardly burned as yet and the force was troubled only by the attacks of individual tribesmen.
Among the ammunition brought over for the army were 2,000 18-pounder shells, 10,000 rounds of smaller calibre artillery shell, more than 1½ million musket rounds and no less than 425 100-lb. barrels of gunpowder.
An exact list of what was lost during the seven-day struggle was never made. Losses did include 27,000 musket rounds, 14 barrels of gunpowder — some of which were blown up to prevent the Afghans getting it — and about 3,000 camels who dropped over precipices, were shot when they fell down through exhaustion or were stolen.
Yet the crossing of the Khojuk Pass by the Army of the Indus ranks as one of the unsung triumphs of British military history — an epic of strength and determination and a tribute to the reputation of this army that subsequent disaster could not diminish. Henry Durand, an engineer-lieutenant with the force, rightly observed, more than 100 years ago: ‘The patient endurance of the modern soldier in honourless labour merits praise as high as that bestowed upon the iron soldiery of Rome… and such praise was fairly won by the European regiments of the Bengal Army…’
Shuja and Macnaghten, having crossed the pass on 19 April had the Shah’s brightly coloured pavilions and tents pitched a few hundred yards from the British camp. One evening, there was a sudden thunder of hooves. A dozen Afghan horsemen tore into the confused crowd of camp-followers, shot down twelve men, seized two women and flung them across their saddles then drove off two caparisoned elephants — the Shah’s personal mount and one lent by him to Macnaghten to sustain the envoy’s dignity. The raiders disappeared over the crest of the surrounding hills with their prize — and the Shah’s troops had not the courage to give chase.
Only a few months earlier, Shaj Shuja had told the Indian Government in a letter: ‘The Ghiljee, Dooranee and other tribes are ready with heart and soul to serve me.’ And now, when he had only just set foot in the country, backed by a powerful army, they had murdered his followers, stolen his elephants and abducted women. It was hardly the welcome he had expected. He was depressed and nervous about the future.
He tried to reassure himself by an official tour of the British camp in his capacity as monarch — ‘a rather stout man of middle height with a long thick neatly trimmed beard dyed black to hide the grey’, noted Lieutenant Henry Havelock, who, twenty years later, as General Havelock, won fame in the Mutiny.
‘He was borne on men’s shoulders in a gilded litter fenced from the sun by a kind of circular dome, guarded by about sixty attendants in scarlet armed with javelins or drawn sabres, some carrying silver sticks, others shouting their master’s titles and all running along at a fast pace. The long caps worn by his retinue were the most unusual — red cloth ornamented by long horns of black felt which made them look like Lucifer.
‘His skin is darker than most Afghans and his features if not decidedly handsome are not unpleasing; but his expression suggests a mixture of the timidity and duplicity often found in men of the ruling circles in southern Asia. His manner towards the English is gently calm and dignified, without haughtiness; but his own subjects complain of him as cold and repulsive even to rudeness.’
This last remark is something of an understatement. Moolah Shikore, Shuja’s aged and diseased Chief Minister, or Vizier, shuffled around minus his ears. The official had offended him some years before, so Shah Shuja had ordered them to be cut off.
So far none of the chiefs had allied themselves with Shuja, but the next day, 20 April, a party of about 200 horsemen appeared over the hill crest some 500 yards away. When a few warning shots were fired by sentries the horsemen halted and one of them boldly rode ahead alone across the plain to Shah Shuja’s camp.
He was Haji Khan, chief of a large independent Afghan clan and a man, noted Major Hough, Deputy Advocate-General to the army, ‘of considerable note in th
e country, having distinguished himself in the field and counsel… Dost Mahommed is known to have said that the only mistake he committed in regard to this man was not having taken his life.’
Haji Khan was notorious even among Afghans for his intrigue and faithlessness. Hearing of the size of the British army, he had deserted his Afghan brethren and hastened to be the first to pay homage to Shah Shuja. Armed to the teeth with a pair of brass-butted flint-lock pistols, an Afghan knife and a tulwar with long curved blade, he prostrated himself before the delighted Shuja, the gold fringe of his turban touching the ground, his baggy cotton trousers slipping up at the ankles to show his fine leather half-boots.
The submission of this chief, notorious though he was, delighted the Shah, who ordered that his followers should be allowed to approach and pitch their tents in the Shah’s camp.
Haji Khan, says Hough, told the Shah about the plans of the Kandahar chiefs. He said they were going to make a night attack yesterday on the British camp, but that he told them that they might expect to be attacked themselves; ‘“You have carried off two of their elephants; the English are not the people to allow this to be done with impunity. They will march with a large force and guns against you and you are unequal to a contest with such troops. Stay where you are and I will go and see if I can find out from what direction they are coming.” I got them to retire, I then moved off with my party and so got rid of them. And I have now come to join your Majesty!’
Such an open confession of treachery was hardly attractive, but Shuja had to be content with whatever allies he could get. Later this day two lesser chiefs with a few hundred more cavalry rode in, paid homage to the Shah and pledged military aid.
These defections to the Shah appear to have unsettled the ruling chiefs of Kandahar, Kohan Dil Khan and his brothers, who were all brothers of Dost Mahommed. They waited for two days, uncertain whether to attack or nor, then deciding against it, retreated inland towards Girishk, a fort 75 miles away on the other side of the Helmund River, rather than join Shuja against Dost Mahommed. Haji Khan, a doubtful ally at best, had at least saved the British a battle when weakened cavalry and artillery horses could easily have paralysed these arms and led to defeat.